Nintendo has made the decision to delay making 64GB game cards for Nintendo Switch available to publishers until 2019.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the company had planned to make them available in the second half of 2018, but have since chosen to push back their plans into 2019 in response to technical issues – the publication citing sources “with direct knowledge of the discussions.”
This has come as a disappointment to publishers that had been anticipating the larger storage capacity that is required to produce more data-heavy games, especially to compete with Blu-ray discs used by PlayStation 4 and Xbox One whose capacity can reach as much as 128GB.
It’s worth mentioning that cost implications may have factored into the decision that Nintendo has made, with game cards known to be more expensive to manufacture in comparison to Blu-ray discs. That has seen publishers choose to release their games on smaller game cards to maximise their profit and leave players to download additional data in order to play them – seen with NBA 2K18, WWE 2K18, and L.A. Noire.
It makes sense, then, that Nintendo would want to produce 64GB game cards when they can become a more plausible choice for publishers – especially at a point in time when higher manufacturing costs are seeing them decide against using 32GB game cards.
